Richard Axel is University Professor and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.  Richard Axel obtained an A.B. from Columbia College and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins Medical School.  Immediately upon leaving medical school, Dr. Axel initiated research in molecular biology and participated in the revolution surrounding the development of recombinant DNA technology.  He then began to apply the new molecular biology to problems in neuroscience with the expectation that genetics could interface with neuroscience to approach the tenuous relationship between genes, behaviour, and perception.  Dr. Axel performed a series of pioneering studies on the logic of the sense of smell, studies that provide insight into how the outside world is represented in the brain.  These studies revealed that at least a thousand genes are involved in the recognition of odours and provided insight into how genes shape our perception of the sensory environment.  For these studies, Dr. Richard Axel shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his student, Linda Buck.

In earlier studies, Richard Axel and his students developed gene transfer techniques that permit the introduction of virtually any gene into any cell.  These studies not only allowed for a novel approach to isolate genes but also provided a detailed analysis of how they worked. At the same time, these experiments allowed for the production of an increasingly large number of clinically important proteins.  These studies also led to the isolation and functional analysis of a gene for the lymphocyte surface protein, CD4, the cellular receptor for the AIDS virus, HIV.   Dr. Axel’s current work centres on how the recognition of odours is translated into an internal representation of sensory quality in the brain and how this representation leads to meaningful thoughts and behaviour.

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